Jeb Bush Announces White House Bid, Saying ‘America Deserves Better’

MIAMI — Jeb Bush, a son and brother of presidents, formally declared a White House candidacy of his own on Monday, portraying himself as the most accomplished leader in the 2016 field, vowing to wage war on Washington’s political culture and insisting that his family name gave him no unique claim to the Oval Office.

As his mother, Barbara, a former first lady, looked on, Mr. Bush directly confronted the central doubt looming over his candidacy: that he presents the latest incarnation of a tired dynasty and thinks himself entitled to the Republican nomination.

“Not a one of us deserves the job by right of résumé, party, seniority, family or family narrative,” he told a crowd of 3,000 supporters in a community college’s gymnasium. “It’s nobody’s turn. It’s everybody’s test.”

After a bumpy six months in which he struggled to excite primary voters who are skeptical of his surname and of his conservative convictions, Mr. Bush turned his announcement rally here into a carefully choreographed reintroduction and a muscular attack on his rivals in both parties.

He tried to distinguish himself as an executive animated by big ideas and uniquely capable of carrying them out, pointing to his record in Florida of introducing a taxpayer-financed school voucher program, expanding charter schools, reducing the size of the state government by thousands of workers and cutting taxes by billions.

He went after Hillary Rodham Clinton — who contends with her own issues of dynastic privilege as she seeks the Democratic nomination — by name, mocking her “no-suspense primary” and warning that “the presidency should not be passed on from one liberal to the next.”

And he belittled some of his most credible Republican opponents in Washington as unseasoned managers. Recalling his two terms as chief executive of Florida, Mr. Bush derisively likened the senators he faces in the primary field — among them Marco Rubio of Florida, once a protégé of Mr. Bush’s — to President Obama, who campaigned for the White House after just three years in the Senate.

“There’s no passing off responsibility when you’re a governor, no blending into the legislative crowd or filing an amendment and calling that success,” Mr. Bush said. “As our whole nation has learned since 2008, executive experience is another term for preparation, and there is no substitute for that.”

In declaring his presidential bid before a cheering crowd at Miami Dade College’s Kendall Campus, he promised to remove Washington as an obstacle to effective government and economic prosperity, saying, “America deserves better.”

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Jeb Bush announced his candidacy in Miami with an emphasis on his bona fides in the Latino and Hispanic communities.

Mr. Bush, whose tenure as governor of Florida was marked by the privatization of traditional state services, vowed to “take Washington — the static capital of this dynamic country — out of the business of causing problems.”

He called upon his record of ambitious, conservative-minded change as Florida’s chief executive. “I know we can fix this,” Mr. Bush said. “Because I’ve done it.”

Mr. Bush, 62, clad in a light blue button-down shirt that highlighted his thinner physique after months of dieting, surrounded himself with a tableau of Miami multiculturalism that stood for the campaign he promises to wage. A black minister offered a prayer, a Cuban family performed Spanish-language songs, and the Colombian-born mother of a mentally disabled child paid tribute to Mr. Bush’s years as governor.

But it was a day of competing and contradictory messages: Even as Mr. Bush assailed Washington as a “club” of “pampered elites,” he was inviting Americans to turn the White House over again to his wealthy family, whose privilege, connections and power have been passed down for generations.

And despite the spectacle of diversity on stage — a reminder of the big tent-style backdrops George W. Bush arranged to emphasize his “compassionate conservatism” theme in his 2000 bid — Mr. Bush’s speech was interrupted by advocates of immigration reform. The protesters wore jerseys that spelled out a sprawling message of disdain for Mr. Bush’s unwillingness to endorse a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented residents. Mr. Bush has endorsed legal status for those immigrants but argues that full citizenship is not politically viable at the moment.

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Mr. Bush, the former governor of Florida, announced that he was officially beginning his presidential bid.CreditCreditJoe Raedle/Getty Images

“Legal status is not enough!” read the protesters’ bright yellow jerseys, each one showing a single letter. The protesters were quickly escorted out, and Mr. Bush gamely tried to co-opt the moment, saying that the next president would enact an immigration overhaul.

Mr. Bush declared his White House ambitions nearly 27 years after his father was elected president, molding a political dynasty that would propel two sons into governorships and one of them, so far, into the Oval Office.

But Mr. Bush enters a presidential contest — unruly in size, unyielding in pace and voracious in cost — that is unlike any faced by his father, George Bush, who won the office in 1988, or his older brother, George W. Bush, who claimed it in 2000.

Mr. Bush acknowledged as much, saying with a touch of deadpan, “I know that there are good people running for president — quite a few, in fact.”

While Mr. Bush never mentioned his Republican rivals by name, it was clear that Mr. Rubio, 44, who announced his candidacy in April a few miles away, was on his mind. The “mess in Washington,” Mr. Bush said, will not be corrected “by electing the people who either helped create it or have proven incapable of fixing it.” He also alluded to Mr. Rubio’s shift away from supporting an immigration overhaul, pledging to take on “issues without flinching, and staying true to what I believe.”

The attempt to take on Mr. Rubio was apparent even before Mr. Bush spoke. His campaign announced an array of endorsements from Florida officials who favor Mr. Bush over Mr. Rubio. One of them, a former president of the State Senate, declared on stage that “Jeb Bush is the Florida Republican who can win.”

Mr. Bush — interrupted by frequent applause from supporters waving signs that read, “Todos por Jeb!” — plainly relished being in his polyglot adopted hometown, delivering several lines in noticeably comfortable Spanish and describing his courtship of his Mexican-born wife as a “cross-border outreach.”

It was Miami, after all, that had allowed Mr. Bush to put his family’s patrician roots in Connecticut and the oil patches of Texas behind him and that eventually nurtured his political ambitions.

In his speech, he both embraced elements of his heritage and tried to transcend them, depicting himself as an entrepreneurial figure who, in the Bush family way, had struck out on his own to build a real estate business.

That Mr. Bush wanted to keep the focus on his own life, not on his famous family, was reinforced with his spare logo, first used in his failed 1994 race for governor. It reads simply “Jeb!” And while Mr. Bush’s mother, his wife, Columba, and his three adult children attended his speech, his father and brother did not.

Mr. Bush’s advisers and allies once predicted that he would emerge as the dominant Republican in the 2016 race, fueled by his record of conservative accomplishment as Florida’s governor and the fund-raising prowess of the Bush family network. But now they are resigned to a far longer and uglier grind for him in the Republican nominating contest.

“The operative word inside the campaign is patience,” said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party leader and longtime ally of Mr. Bush’s. “As people get to know him, things will get better.”

But other Republicans have their doubts, in no small part because of the familial concerns Mr. Bush sought to assuage here.

“Republicans generally respect and admire the Bush family,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma. “They are much more ambivalent about the Bush legacy.”

Yet the presence of George P. Bush, Mr. Bush’s eldest son and the newly elected Texas land commissioner, as one of the opening acts was a reminder that the family has no plans to retreat from public life.

Asked on his way into the rally whether there were any other Bushes who would seek the presidency, Neil Bush, one of Jeb’s younger brothers, said, “This will be it — for this generation.”